What is the Spaulding Manuscript?

The Spaulding Manuscript is a fictional story about a
group of Romans who, while sailing to England early in the fourth century A.D., were blown
off course and landed in eastern North America. One of them kept a record of their
experiences among eastern and midwestern American Indian tribes. The 175-page manuscript
was first published as a 115-page monograph in 1885, some seventy years after the death of
its author, Solomon Spaulding (sometimes spelled Spalding). The only known manuscript was
lost from 1839 until its discovery in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1884. It was promptly published
by both the Latter-day Saints and Reorganized Latter Day Saint churches to refute the
theory of some critics that it had served as an original source document for the Book of
Mormon, supposedly supplied to Joseph Smith by Sidney Rigdon.

Spaulding was born in Ashford, Connecticut, on February
21, 1761. He served in the American Revolution, later graduated from Dartmouth College,
and became a clergyman. He subsequently lost his faith in the Bible, left the ministry,
and worked unsuccessfully at a variety of occupations in New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania
until his death near Pittsburgh in 1816. About 1812 he wrote Manuscript Found, which he
attempted to publish to relieve pressing debts.

There are similarities in the explanation for the
origins of both Manuscript Found and the Book of Mormon. The introduction to the Spaulding
work claims that its author was walking near Conneaut, Ohio (about 150 miles west of the
place in New York where Joseph Smith obtained the gold plates), when he discovered an
inscribed, flat stone. This he raised with a lever, uncovering a cave in which lay a stone
box containing twenty-eight rolls of parchment. The writing was in Latin. The story is
primarily a secular one, having virtually no religious content. A character in the novel
possessed a seerstone, similar to objects used by Joseph Smith. However, none of the many
names found in either volume matches any of those in the other, nor is there the remotest
similarity in literary styles.

The first to assert that a direct connection existed
between the Book of Mormon and Manuscript Found was Doctor Philastus Hurlbut, who was
excommunicated from the Church in June 1833. Desiring to discredit his former
coreligionists, Hurlbut set out in the ensuing months to refute Joseph Smith's claims for
the origins of the Book of Mormon. He interviewed members of Spaulding's family, who swore
that there were precise similarities between Spaulding's work and the Book of Mormon. He
also located the neglected manuscript, but must have been disappointed to discover that it
had no demonstrable connection with the Book of Mormon.

In 1834, Hurlbut was involved with Eber D. Howe in
preparing a significant anti-Mormon publication, Mormonism Unvailed. Its final chapter
dealt with the Spaulding theory of the origin of the Book of Mormon. Howe admitted in the
book that the only document known to have been authored by Spaulding had been found, but
he asserted that this was not Manuscript Found. The title penciled on the brown paper
cover was Manuscript StoryConneaut Creek. Howe speculated that Spaulding must have
composed another manuscript that served as the source of the Book of Mormon, but no
additional writings of Spaulding have ever surfaced. By the 1840s, the so-called Spaulding
theory had become the main anti-Mormon explanation for the Book of Mormon.

Spaulding's manuscript, lost for forty-five years, was
among items shipped from the office of the Ohio Painesville Telegraph, owned by Eber D.
Howe, when that office was purchased in 1839 by L. L. Rice, who subsequently moved to
Honolulu. Rice discovered the manuscript in 1884 while searching his collection for
abolitionist materials for his friend James H. Fairchild, president of Oberlin College.
Believers in the Book of Mormon felt vindicated by this discovery, and they published
Spaulding's work to show the world it was not the source for the Book of Mormon.

Since 1946, no serious student of Mormonism has given
the Spaulding Manuscript theory much credibility. In that year, Fawn Brodie published No
Man Knows My History. This biography of Joseph Smith, hostile to his prophetic claims,
dismissed the idea of any connection between Spaulding and Smith or their writings. Rigdon
first met Joseph Smith in December 1830 after the Book of Mormon was published.

Nevertheless, some have continued to promote the
Spaulding theory (e.g., see Holley). In 1977, graphologists claimed to have detected
similarities between the handwriting of Spaulding and of one of the scribes who
transcribed some of the Book of Mormon from Joseph Smith's dictation. After considerable
media attention and further scrutiny, anti-Mormon spokespersons acknowledged that they had
been too hasty. The handwriting evidence did not support a connection between Solomon
Spaulding and Joseph Smith.

One of the earliest attempts to discredit the Book of Mormon was the argument that it
was derived from a lengthy manuscript written by Solomon Spaulding (sometimes spelled
Spalding) in 1812. The only known manuscript by Spaulding, now called Manuscript
Found, was lost for many years, but was discovered in 1884 and finally published in
1885 (see the article, "Spaulding Manuscript" by Lance D. Chase in Vol. 3 of the Encyclopedia of Mormonism). Now that we know what is in the manuscript, it is
obvious that it could not have been the source for the Book of Mormon, as I'll discuss
below. The Spaulding theory could survive only as long as the evidence was hidden.

The Spaulding manuscript tells of finding a lost Roman document in a cave near
Conneaut, Ohio, which was close to Kirtland, Ohio, the latter serving as Church
Headquarters for several years at a time of severe anti-LDS propaganda and persecution.
Some people in Conneaut, upon learning of the Book of Mormon, claimed it was much the same
as Spaulding's manuscript and that they shared common stories, dealt with Israelites in
ancient America, and shared names such as Nephi, Lehi, and Zarahemla. The bitter
anti-Mormon Philastrus Hurlbut, who had been excommunicated from the Church in 1833 for
adultery, gathered affidavits from family members about the manuscript and its
relationship to the Book of Mormon. These affidavits would be published in E.D. Howe's
archetypal anti-Mormon book, Mormonism Unvailed, in 1834, along with many
other affidavits that Hurlbut gathered against Joseph Smith from people who claimed to
have known him well. (Interestingly, many of the affidavits condemning Joseph Smith show
strong signs of common authorship.) Hurlbut also obtained the Spaulding manuscript and was
disappointed to find that it was quite unrelated to the Book of Mormon. While there had
never been any indication that Spaulding had written more than one manuscript, Howe and
Hurlbut then argued that Spaulding had rewritten the story to deal with Israelites at an
earlier time and be in scriptural language. It was alleged Joseph Smith used this
rewritten Spaulding Manuscript to create the Book of Mormon and that Joseph had probably
received it or information about it from Sidney Rigdon (even though Joseph did not meet
Sidney until after publication of the Book of Mormon). This theory became a primary
anti-Mormon attack on the Book of Mormon for many years.

In 1884,Manuscript Found was finally discovered in Hawaii among
"items shipped from the office of the Ohio Painesville Telegraph, owned by Eber D.
Howe, when that office was purchased in 1839 by L. L. Rice, who subsequently moved to
Honolulu" (Chase, op. cit.). The manuscript was published by Latter-day Saints and
the RLDS Church as well. Supporters of Joseph Smith felt vindicated, for it was clearly
not the source of the Book of Mormon (the possibility of a second document will be
discussed below). But there were some similarities, as L.D. Chase explains (ibid.):

The Spaulding Manuscript is a fictional story about a group of Romans who, while
sailing to England early in the fourth century A.D., were blown off course and landed in
eastern North America. One of them kept a record of their experiences among eastern and
midwestern American Indian tribes. . . .

There are similarities in the explanation for the origins of both Manuscript
Found and the Book of Mormon. The introduction to the Spaulding work claims that
its author was walking near Conneaut, Ohio (about 150 miles west of the place in New York
where Joseph Smith obtained the gold plates), when he discovered an inscribed, flat stone.
This he raised with a lever, uncovering a cave in which lay a stone box containing
twenty-eight rolls of parchment. The writing was in Latin. The story is primarily a
secular one, having virtually no religious content. A character in the novel possessed a
seerstone, similar to objects used by Joseph Smith. However, none of the many names found
in either volume matches any of those in the other, nor is there the remotest similarity
in literary styles.

Joseph, of course, found the gold plates in a stone box, and the Book of Mormon also
deals with people who anciently sailed to the Americas and kept a written record. Therein
lie the most "impressive" similarities between the only known Spaulding
Manuscript and the Book of Mormon.

Was there a second manuscript? Not wishing to publish the one Spaulding Manuscript that
Hurlbut had found, Howe claimed and used affidavits extracted from three people, that it
had been rewritten in a way that made it almost the same as the Book of Mormon. None of
the original eight primary witnesses from Conneaut who spoke of the relationship between
Spaulding's manuscript and the Book of Mormon ever mentioned a second manuscript or spoke
of a revision. There is no mention of a second document or a revision to Biblical language
until after Hurlbut returned with the disappointing manuscript of Spaulding. It is Howe
who claims that there was no relationship between the known manuscript and the Book of
Mormon, and that there must be a second manuscript. As B.H. Roberts explained in an
excellent and lengthy analysis of Howe's discussion (Defense of the Faith and the
Saints, Vol.2, p.122):

That statement bears all the earmarks of an "afterthought," a silly
invention. There is not a single scrap of evidence in all that has been written upon the
subject, that goes beyond the date of Hurlbut's delivery of "Manuscript Found,"
to E. D. Howe, to the effect that Spaulding had written more than one paper that purported
to deal with a found manuscript, or the ancient inhabitants of America. . . . Why was it
that the neighbors of Spaulding about Conneaut did not say before this manuscript was
brought to light by Howe, Hurlbut et at., that Spaulding had written several manuscripts
on the subject of the ancient inhabitants of America; one that told of a Roman colony came
to America and settled in the Ohio valley, the story of their adventures being
"written in modern style;" but that this story he abandoned and wrote another,
going farther back with his dates and assigning to the people an Israelitish origin and
writing in the old scripture style? How valuable such evidence, ante-dating Hurlbut's
coming to Conneaut with Spaulding's manuscript, would be! But it does not exist.

Howe's claim was not that there was a completely new, unrelated missing manuscript, but
a missing manuscript that was a revision of the one Hurlbut had found. But such a rewrite
would be analogous to rewriting a chapter in Moby Dick to come up with the
Book of Genesis (both mention whales and water). It is pure fantasy. Manuscript
Found, marked with name of Conneaut on its cover page, was almost certainly the one
that the witnesses of Conneaut had heard over twenty years before hearing of the Book of
Mormon. The memory and truthfulness of the witnesses, zealous to defend religious
orthodoxy, are highly questionable (see B.H. Roberts, ibid.). Even more disappointing is
the deceitfulness of Howe.

Any argument that tries to credit Solomon Spaulding for anything in the Book of Mormon
faces the overwhelming obstacle of establishing a real connection between Joseph Smith and
Solomon Spaulding. There is no evidence that they ever met or that Joseph ever even heard
of Spaulding's manuscript before publication of the Book of Mormon. Some recent critics
have noted that an uncle of Spaulding lived in Sharon, Vermont at the same time Joseph
Smith's family did. However, the Smiths moved away several years before the Spaulding
manuscript existed, and left Vermont altogether before Joseph reached the age of ten
(Isaac Carter, Review of Books on the Book of Mormon, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1994,
p.116). Any conjectured relationship between Joseph and Spaulding during his years in
Vermont seems implausible.

The Spaulding theory was rejected by anti-Mormon writer Fawn Brodie in 1946, but
continues to be repeated in many anti-Mormon publications (along with many other
long-refuted allegations from E.D. Howe and other early anti-Mormons, whose writings are
repeatedly parroted). There is no substance to any resurrected form of the Spaulding
theory and allegations of a second missing document. Certainly nothing known to Solomon
Spaulding could account for the presence of chiasmus in the Book of Mormon, or the amazing
evidence concerning the Arabian Peninsula in First Nephi, or any of the other evidences of authenticity for the Book of Mormon.

A recent attempt to revive the Spaulding theory is the 45-page work of Vernal Holley, Book
of Mormon Authorship: A Closer Look, Zenos Publications, Ogden, Utah, 1983. This
publication has been reviewed by L. Ara Norwood in Review of Books on the Book of
Mormon, Vol. 1 (1989), pp. 80-88. Norwood's review is now available
online at the FARMS site.